Treading lightlyLIEUTENANT Mehmet Ali Celebi has not sat in a gunship cockpit for years, but will jump back in at a moment’s notice if the Turkish army comes calling. A promising helicopter pilot, Mr Celebi was sentenced to 16 years in jail in 2013, framed by policemen who uploaded numbers belonging to Islamist radicals onto his phone. He was released a year later, along with hundreds of other secularist officers who had been locked away on trumped-up charges by prosecutors close to the Gulen community, a secretive Islamic movement.
Since July’s thwarted coup, staged by an army faction believed to be led by Gulenists, the tables have turned. Today, it is Gulen followers in the bureaucracy who are being indiscriminately purged by their one-time patrons, the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party. Some 70,000 civil servants, including judges, prosecutors and teachers, have been sacked or suspended, sometimes on the thinnest of evidence. At least 32,000 people, including more than 100 journalists, are in prison.
The crackdown has left the second-biggest army in NATO in turmoil—this at a time when it is supposed to be fighting in...Continue reading
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